Hindered by Geography but Surmounting It

The Times’s chief film critics, A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis, offer suggestions for renewing the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

It is easy enough to quibble with — or to celebrate — the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s programming choices and publicity efforts. There are too many wheezy national-cinema omnibuses and too few genuinely adventurous offerings. But then again, there are annual treasures like Film Comment Selects, the Making Waves series on Romanian cinema and the venerable and vigorous New York Film Festival, the seed from which the Film Society sprouted. Any organization that has survived for so long with such broad and lofty ambitions will be a mixed bag. But the society faces challenges that lie beyond the fluctuations of its event calendar. Its deeper, structural problems result in large measure from geography, architecture and the changing demographics of New York’s film culture.

The Film Society is literally, physically alienated from its audience. Its largest screening space, the Walter Reade Theater — one of the finest movie-watching rooms the city, thanks to a high ceiling, steeply banked seats, a large screen and superb projection — is perched above the north side of 65th street, far from Lincoln Center’s other attractions, like an unwelcome in-law shoved into the attic. The Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, with its street-level box office and lively cafe, is a bit more welcoming, even if its three screening rooms are on the small side. But both sites feel like nooks and crannies, marginal to the grand cultural endeavor that defines this venerable mass of travertine, glass and high-cultural aspiration.

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A brunch and a performance by the Newton Gang before a showing of “Tombstone” at the Nitehawk Cinema.CreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times

The surrounding neighborhood has also slipped away from the Film Society. The Upper West Side was once dotted with revival houses and art cinemas. Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, just across Broadway from Lincoln Center, is a proud remnant of that era of cinephilia. And the area was also once an outpost of Manhattan’s middle-class bohemia, where herds of would-be intellectuals grazed in used-book stores and argued in coffee shops. It was not quite Greenwich Village, but it was a short subway ride away.

Now the blocks between Central Park and the Hudson are given over mostly to stockbrokers and grandmothers, and the city’s center of cultural gravity has swung south and east, to Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn and bubbling pockets of Queens. In those areas, where the Film Society should be seeking out its public, it finds competition: from established nonprofit institutions like the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Film Forum and the Museum of the Moving Image, which are surrounded by the bars, boutiques and brunch spots that can extend a trip to the movies into a day- or evening-long adventure; from new theaters and pop-up programs like Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg and the Gowanus-based Rooftop Films; and from the Tribeca Film Festival and its satellites.

The success of all these enterprises is evidence that people — including young people — will still leave the house to see a film. But it also points to an obstacle that has always distinguished the Film Society from its Lincoln Center kin, which is that filmgoers have lots of other places to go. The Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theater and the New York Philharmonic are unique institutions, able to attract both the patronage of the donor class and the loyalty of fans. The Film Society enjoys no such monopoly, and apart from the New York Film Festival — a glittery two-week party for philanthropists and rank-and-file movie buffs alike — it seems perpetually unsure of how to cultivate a passionate constituency.

There is no easy solution. The Film Society is unlikely to uproot itself from its recently expanded home on 65th Street. But it needs — as a matter of programming, marketing, media strategy and philosophy — to venture beyond the walls of the castle. It is interesting to note that most of the institutions that dominate Lincoln Center invoke the city in their names. The Film Society provides an address, which is not quite enough. The Met and the Philharmonic belong to New York, and are confident that it will come to them. The Film Society needs to move in the other direction, and rediscover a public that it has too long ignored and taken for granted.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR10 of the New York edition with the headline: Hindered by Geography but Surmounting It. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe